PENNSBURG >> In the hours before the cold, dead body of accused mass murderer Bradley William Stone was found Tuesday afternoon in a marshy wooded area a half-mile from his Pennsburg home, the gray skies opened up, sending a handful of curious gawkers standing on the sidewalk outside Stone’s brick-fronted house scurrying to find cover from the downpour.

Through the hole where Stone’s front door used to be — less than 24 hours after a SWAT team smashed it in during an intensive manhunt for the 35-year-old — sat a partially decorated Christmas tree, shelves lined with books and puzzle boxes and other eerie vestiges of a life before the carnage.

Before Stone, a military veteran involved in a custody dispute with his former wife, 33-year-old Nicole Stone, chose to go on a killing rampage in the early Monday morning darkness, slaughtering Nicole and five of her family members at three locations in Montgomery County, then returning to Pennsburg, where he dropped off his two daughters that he’d snatched from his ex-wife’s Lower Salford home, then vanished before daybreak.

The heightened urgency of Monday’s manhunt — during which SWAT units sped from one of the murder scenes in Souderton, where Stone was initially thought to be hiding out, to his Fourth Street residence and surrounded it into the evening hours before determining he wasn’t there, either — gave way Tuesday to a more methodical search by law enforcement officers who believed he hadn’t traveled very far from his borough home.

Heavily armed SWAT team members on foot, accompanied by K-9 units, swept up and down wet Pennsburg streets all morning, searching houses and alleys and Dumpsters in their hunt for Stone.

Two blocks from Stone’s house, a middle-aged man who declined to give his name watched a SWAT team pass by.

“I hope they find that (expletive) and kill him,” he said.

Around 2 p.m., as two armored SWAT vehicles that had been stationed along Fourth Street suddenly sped off, word started to ripple through media members that had been observing and trailing SWAT members with their cameras and notepads that Stone’s body had been found in tree- and brush-choked acres close to his home.

In the wooded area behind 54-year-old Maryann Rumford’s home at Fifth and Perkiomen streets, where she’s lived for 25 years, yellow police tape cordoned off an area at least the length and width of a football field. Deep within, investigators could be seen moving slowly, kneeling down, the occasional flash of a camera strobe signaling it was indeed a crime scene.

Rumford and one of her neighbors, 45-year-old Vicky Coburn, said they had seen two female law enforcement officers pass by their houses, checking inside cars parked nearby.

“We went over and said hi to them,” said Coburn. “They thought he might be sleeping in a car.”

Rumford and Coburn watched the officers walk toward the wooded area, then went back in their homes.

“I was in the kitchen cleaning up, and I told my son to go outside and split some of the wood,” Rumford said. “He looked out the window and said, ‘Mom, there’s caution tape all through our woods, and there’s a whole bunch of people in our yard.’ And then I saw all the news vans showing up.”

As two Pennsylvania State Police troopers stood on Fifth Street, their patrol vehicle blocking off traffic, other neighbors and a few news reporters and photographers streamed onto Rumford’s property to see where the hunt for a rampaging killer had come to an end.

By nightfall, authorities had removed the body of Stone — dead by his own hand, from a self-inflicted stab wound, Montgomery County District Attorney Risa Vetri Ferman said, though it was unclear when he had killed himself — from the muddy ground and drove it away in a white van.

The question of “where” had been answered, though questions of “why” remained.